8.26.2014

ARTICLE: Where slavery thrived, inequality rules today

-->By Gloria Dulan-WilsonThe tragedy of the article I'm sharing with you below is that this is not new news to us - we who were/are the victims of slavery, know all too well the seriousness of post traumatic slave syndrome in it's physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional incarnations. We see it all around us, and, unfortunately, when we look in the mirror, or at many of our friends, loved ones, neighbors, enemies (?), we see it in them as well.Try as we might, when we think we've defeated it in one arena, it rears its ugly head in another. Of course there are also those of us who are in denial as to whether or not we are affected by this uber massive affliction. And I applaud them for wanting to put it behind them and move forward. Would that we could on a mass mentality level. But the sad state of affairs is that it's like a gaping wound that has been systematically covered over with a series of inadequate bandaids, and exacerbated by the salt that is continually being rubbed in them by the perpetrators who continue to poke at it, while at the same time either telling us to "get over it" or that "it's no big deal" or that "this is a different age or time," while continuing to commit the same crimes in a different, more sophisticated way.We are fortunate that we can cover our pain in a panache of false smiles, proper english, beautiful clothes, bleached blonde hair or wigs, mis-education with higher level degrees up the ying/yang, and all manners of camouflage. But those of our brothers and sisters who were not so fortunate, who got stuck in the muck of the southern sado/masochistic symbiotic relationships, are still living as if they had just stepped off the plantation; as if they had just received their manumission papers and didn't know what to do with their "freedom." Now this, folks, is my commentary without having read the article - because we know this story all too well - we've got relatives still going through it. I find it interesting that this article has been written at this point in time, and I'm curious to see what, if any, impact or change it will make on the meanstream majority. W.E.B. DuBois wrote "The Philadelphia Negro" in 1899, where gave sociological and statistical data on the lives of Black people during the post-slavery era, as well, Some of the same issues identified in the following article exist and continue to linger into modern times, even though Philadelphia was not part of a slave state, but a Northern industrialized community, with superior educational systems in place. The entire text of DuBois' study can be found online for those interested in reading this classic. The fact remains that regardless of who did the study, or when it was conducted, there is much to be resolved if it is not to continue as a canker sore on the butt of America. We definitely should not be waiting to see whether the meanstream, is going to save us, or if we are going to save ourselves. Or whether this will be a cooperative effort.I still maintain, "if no one else will save you, save yourself!"Stay Blessed & ECLECTICALLY BLACK Gloria Dulan-Wilson

The text of the article follows:

Where
slavery thrived, inequality rules today

More
than a century later, some experts say, a terrible institution is still
exacting its price

Fluker,
La., and other municipalities with ties to slavery often lack social
mobility.

EARLIER
THIS MONTH,
Standard and Poor’s Rating Services, a credit rating firm that rarely weighs
in on social issues, published a scathing report on income inequality and
social mobility in the United States. The firm warned that current levels of
inequality were “dampening” growth, and predicted that “inequalities will
extend into the next generation, with diminished opportunities for upward
social mobility.”

This
unusual report on inequality, like Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book on the
same subject, addresses unequal fortunes, declining mobility, and stagnating
economic growth as national or even global problems, which demand similarly
large-scale solutions. But scholars are also well aware that these problems
vary greatly from place to place. Consider a recent, much-publicized study of
social mobility by economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Harvard and
Berkeley. As the illuminating map generated by that study shows, children born
in some regions—Salt Lake City and San Jose, Calif., for example—have a
reasonable shot of moving up the social ladder. By contrast, many parts of the
former Confederacy, it seems, are now the places where the American dream goes
to die.

Why is
that true? At first blush, you might guess race could explain the variation.
When the study’s authors crunched the data, they found that the larger the
black population in any given county, the lower the overall social mobility.
But there was more to the story than blacks unable to break the cycle of
poverty. In a passing comment, Chetty and his co-authors observed that “both
blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have
lower rates of upward income mobility.” Far from being divergent, the fates of
poor blacks and poor whites in these regions are curiously, inextricably,
intertwined.

Instead
of chalking it up to race, recent research points toward a more startling and
somewhat controversial explanation: When we see broad areas of inequality in
America today, what we are actually seeing is the lingering stain of slavery.
Since 2002, with increasing refinement in the years since, economic historians
have argued that the “peculiar institution,” as it was once called, is dead
but not gone. Today, in the 21st century, it still casts an economic shadow
over both blacks and whites: “Slavery,” writes Harvard economist Nathan Nunn,
“had a long-term effect on inequality as well as
income.”

His work
is representative of a new, more historical direction within economics. Its
proponents believe that institutions devised centuries ago tend to persist,
structuring economic reality in the 21st century in ways that are largely
invisible. Their hope is that, by tracing these connections between past and
present, they may be able to point the way toward more effective solutions to
today’s seemingly intractable economic problems.

***

IN
2002, two
economic historians, Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, published an
influential paper that tried to answer a vexing question: why are some
countries in the Americas defined by far more extreme and enduring levels of
inequality—and by extension, limited social mobility and economic
underdevelopment—than others?

The
answer, they argued, lay in the earliest history of each country’s settlement.
The political and social institutions put in place then tended to perpetuate
the status quo. They concluded that societies that began “with extreme
inequality tended to adopt institutions that served to advantage members of
the elite and hamper social mobility.” This, they asserted, resulted in
economic underdevelopment over the long run.

More
specifically, they observed that regions where sugar could be profitably grown
invariably gave rise to societies defined by extreme inequality. The reason,
they speculated, had to do with the fact that large-scale sugar plantations
made intensive use of slave labor, generating institutions that privileged a
small elite of white planters over a majority of black slaves. These
institutions, their later work suggested, could encompass everything from
property rights regimes to tax structures to public
schools.

Harvard
economist Nathan Nunn offered a more detailed statistical analysis of this
“Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis” in a paper first published in 2008. His
research confirmed that early slave use in the Americas was correlated with
poor long-term growth. More specifically, he examined county-level data on
slavery and inequality in the United States, and found a robust correlation
between past reliance on slave labor and both economic underdevelopment and
contemporary inequality. He disagreed with Engerman and Sokoloff’s claim that
it was only large-scale plantation slavery that generated these effects;
rather, he found, any kind of slavery seemed to have begotten long-term
economic woes.

Nunn
also offered a more precise explanation for present-day troubles. In Engerman
and Sokoloff’s narrative, slavery led to inequality, which led to economic
underdevelopment. But when Nunn examined levels of inequality in 1860—as
measured by holdings of land—these proved a poor predictor of future problems.
Only the presence of slavery was a harbinger of problems. “It is not economic
inequality that caused the subsequent development of poor institutions,” wrote
Nunn. “Rather, it was slavery itself.”

This
finding was echoed in a study by Brazilian economists Rodrigo Soares, Juliano
Assunção, and Tomás Goulart published in the Journal of Comparative Economics
in 2012. Soares and his colleagues examined the connection between historical
slavery and contemporary inequality in a number of countries, largely in Latin
America. The authors found a consistent correlation between the existence—and
intensity—of slavery in the past and contemporary inequality. Moreover, this
relationship was independent of the number of people of African descent living
there today. As Soares said in an interview, “Societies that used more slavery
are not more unequal simply because they have relatively more black
people.”

The
question, then, is how exactly did slavery have this effect on contemporary
inequality? Soares and his colleagues speculated that limited political rights
for slaves and their descendants played a role, as did negligible access to
credit and capital. Racial discrimination, too, would have played a part,
though this would not explain why whites born in former slaveholding regions
might find themselves subject to higher levels of inequality. Nunn, though,
advanced an additional explanation, pointing to an idea advanced by Stanford
economic historian Gavin Wright in 2006.

In lands
turned over to slavery, Wright had observed, there was little incentive to
provide so-called public goods—schools, libraries, and other institutions—that
attract migrants. In the North, by contrast, the need to attract and retain
free labor in areas resulted in a far greater investment in public
goods—institutions that would, over the succeeding decades, offer far greater
opportunities for social mobility and lay the foundation for sustained,
superior economic growth.

As it
happens, a contemporary critic of slavery took it upon himself to measure some
of these differences between North and South. In 1857, a Southerner named
Hinton Rowan Helper published an incendiary book titled “The Impending
Crisis.” Though a virulent racist, Helper was no friend of slavery, and he
quantified in excruciating detail the relative number of schools, libraries,
and other institutions in both free and slaveholding states, finding time and
again that his region failed to measure up to the North.

In
Pennsylvania he found 393 public libraries, but in South Carolina, a mere 26.
In the South, he observed, “the common school-house, the poor man’s college,
is hardly known, showing how little interest is felt in the chief treasures of
the State, the immortal minds of the multitude who are not born to
wealth.”

***

WHAT
SOMEONE like
Helper may not have foreseen is that the abolition of slavery would not cure
these ills. The destruction of slavery did not destroy all the political
institutions, social mores, and cultural traditions that sustained it. Nor did
it make public institutions, of the kind that the north had been building for
decades, suddenly come into being.

This
notion about the “persistence” of economic institutions is part of a larger
dialogue within economics. Economists ranging from MIT’s Daron Acemoglu to
Harvard’s Melissa Fisher have examined how institutions and practices adopted
centuries ago can shape economic reality. But not everyone buys the idea that
the past can structure the present in such an enduring, predictable fashion.
Wright is among the critics of this approach; he is skeptical of Engerman and
Sokoloff’s hypothesis. “The persistence of inequality per se is a myth,” he
says, pointing to research that highlights the degree to which inequality has
ebbed and flowed in Latin America.

Wright
counts himself “unconvinced” regarding comparable claims about the United
States. “No doubt slavery has played some kind of background role,” he
concedes. But he sees the relationship between historical slavery and
contemporary inequality as an interesting correlation, not a directly causal
one. Correlating one variable with another across the centuries “isn’t the
same as writing history,” he notes. “If you don’t connect the dots, you’re
just groping.”

Another
criticism of the “persistence” school is that it may justify passivity. If
counties or countries have always been poor or unequal because of something
that happened so long ago, what chance do contemporary policy makers have at
deflecting the dead hand of the past?

But
there is room for hope, as Wright’s own research would suggest. In “Sharing
the Prize,” an economic history of the civil rights movement published in
2013, Wright found that efforts to end discrimination paid substantial,
enduring benefits to black Southerners. Perhaps more surprisingly, he found
that the movement benefited whites, too. Many poorer whites found that that
the destruction of the old order—the end of poll taxes, for example—ushered in
increased levels of public funding for schools, newfound political power, and
a host of other economic, political, and educational benefits, particularly in
the years immediately following the passage of the Civil Rights
Act.

That
revolution, of course, is still a work in progress. As we’ve been reminded
over the last two weeks by the clashes in Ferguson, Mo., between mostly black
protesters and a mostly white police force, there’s a long way to go before
the vestiges of slavery are fully and finally made a thing of the past. But
this new body of research may help us grasp that solutions to persistent
inequality will require more focused policies. Increasing the level of food
stamps, as economist Paul Krugman has suggested, might help, but it is perhaps
too diffuse and indiscriminate a solution.

Instead,
the best way to deal with the lingering effects of dead institutions like
slavery may be to create regional institutions aimed to promoting social
mobility and economic growth. Georgia, for example, has tried to level the
field with the “HOPE Scholarship,” which enables high schoolers with a “B”
average or higher to attend in-state public colleges and universities for free
and private in-state schools at a heavy discount.

Such
programs, with some modifications, could go a long way toward promoting social
mobility in the former slaveholding regions of the United States. That’s not
to say that the problems will be easy to solve. But the progress we’ve already
made, both politically and economically, would suggest that while we may live
in slavery’s shadow, we are not prisoners of the past,
either.

Stephen
Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, and
co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the
Future of Finance” (2010).